Linux 5.14-rc4 Released With Change Following Some Broken Android Apps, Other Fixes

Linux 5.14-rc4 is available today as a rather smooth update with nothing too worrisome but just a decent amount of fixes and nothing that is causing Linux creator Linus Torvalds to be frustrated.

Linus briefly summed it up in the 5.14-rc4 announcement, "Nothing to see here, entirely normal rc4. It's mostly a very nice and flat diffstat - so small spread out changes - with the exception of a couple of blips in selftests and the xfs fixes. Mostly drivers, some arch updates, networking, plus tooling and selftests. Nothing odd stands out."

Catching our attention this week is that Linux 5.14-rc4 does change some pipe behavior after the Linux kernel broke some Android apps back in 2019. An interesting situation of reverting kernel behavior to restore binary compatibility with older kernels even when it was user-space abusing an interface. But in any case the overall impact should be small.

Linux 5.14-rc4 also drops a DEC Alpha specific x86 binary loader although other alternatives exist for those wanting to run a newer kernel on your aging Alpha platform wanting to be able to run x86 Intel Linux binaries.

Also this week there were AMD PMC updates, Intel Alder Lake HID support, and more to make it in via platform-drivers-x86.

Overall though it was a rather pleasant week and nice way to end July with nothing really scary landing, but we'll see how the next few weeks play out to see if this will be an on-time kernel release or not.

Meanwhile see our Linux 5.14 feature overview to learn more about all of the work in this new kernel version. Linux 5.14 stable should be out around the end of August or early September depending upon how the rest of the cycle pans out.